LIFE OF A TUNNEL RAT: FIGHTING FEAR IN `NAM

Peter GornerCHICAGO TRIBUNE

American officers in Vietnam viewed the short, wiry combat engineers as SWAT teams to be summoned whenever a suspicious hole was found in the ground. To fellow GIs, these ''Tunnel Rats'' were cocky members of a spit-and-polish clique who kept to themselves, ridiculed rank, disdained drugs and self-doubts, and exulted in jobs that no sane man would do.

The Viet Cong guerrillas, however, respected the American tunnel soldiers as deadly hunters, who--armed with only knives, flashlights and pistols

--chased them through stinking ratholes to oblivion.

Today, the VC honor the Tunnel Rats who fought them man-to-man as America`s best soldiers in the 10,000-day Vietnam War. Ironically, it has taken the Communists to tell this nation about them.

''By the time American forces entered Vietnam in force in 1965, the guerrillas had dug into Uncle Ho`s beloved earth,'' says Tom Mangold, a correspondent for the British Broadcasting Co. (BBC) who, with colleague John Penycate, has unearthed the vicious story of tunnel warfare in Vietnam.

''Time and again the Viet Cong would execute hit-and-run raids and simply melt away,'' Mangold says. ''They vanished because elaborate networks of tunnels and caves connected villages, districts, even provinces. These evolved as the response by a poorly equipped guerrilla army against massive modern war technology.

''The tunnels, thus, had great symbolic significance to the Viet Cong. They became convinced that if they persevered and maintained an active presence, they could win the war.''

During the French occupation that ended in 1954 with the fall of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnamese peasants--like an army of fleas--had methodically used their hands and tin bowls to carve up their land, often carrying out the concealed dirt in plain view of the enemy. But the true magnitude of the effort remained hidden until 1978, when Mangold and Penycate became the first BBC journalists to be granted visas by the newly victorious government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to visit Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).

As a point of interest, the reporters were shown a massive tunnel complex dug into the protective clay of the district of Cu Chi, just 20 miles north of Saigon. The reporters later conducted detailed interviews with the few tunnel guerrillas who had survived the war. They, in turn, told the journalists about the American Tunnel Rats.

The tunnels, and the unpublicized life-and-death struggles that had occurred therein, shocked Mangold. A former war correspondent, he remembered very well the district within a 70-square-mile natural citadel of jungle and briar.

''Everybody in Saigon knew that Charlie was all over Cu Chi, but no journalist knew about the tunnels,'' Mangold says. ''The place was a free-fire zone--the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated and devastated area in the history of warfare. From hotels in Saigon, we`d watch returning planes routinely dump unused bombs and napalm over Cu Chi.''

But, as Mangold and Penycate detail in their remarkable new book, ''The Tunnels of Cu Chi'' (Random House, $19.95), the complexes withstood all attempts to occupy and hold the area the Communists now honor as the ''Land of Fire.''

''They consistently underestimated the extent and importance of the tunnels. In 1966, they even built Cu Chi base, a 1,500-acre complex housing 4,500 men, directly over a thriving rat`s nest of VC tunnels. Charlie had a field day then, blowing up planes and equipment from within the perimeter. It later came out that even the base barbers--all 13 of them--were Viet Cong.''

The secret Cu Chi tunnels were ''like a thorn stabbing the enemy in the eye,'' a VC officer told Mangold. The guerrillas lost 12,000 people there, but still were able to infiltrate Saigon with intelligence agents, party cadres and sabotage teams. The 1968 Tet Offensive was planned and launched underground; the tunnels housed thousands of troops.

A network of small access holes (2 feet wide by 3 feet deep) led to communication tunnels that, via a series of cleverly hidden trap doors, zigzagged up, sideways and down as far as 18 feet. These passageways led to a labyrinth of caverns and caves that snaked through as many as 4 separate levels for 200 miles, stretching all the way to the Cambodian border.

Air, sanitation, water and cooking facilities were sufficient to maintain a primitive but reasonably safe existence. In the subterreanean mazes (few of which were more than 6 feet high), the Viet Cong built sleeping chambers, air- raid shelters, latrines, hospitals, kitchens, stages for political theater, conference centers and print shops. They stored huge caches of rice, precious water buffalo and captured American artillery (they even entombed an American tank).

As bombs hurtled down and tanks rumbled overhead, the guerrillas lived uncomfortably in the dank and darkness sometimes for years. They built booby traps and weapons in complete ordnance factories. They made antipersonnel mines at primitive forges. They repaired ''dud'' American shells and bombs for reuse.

The Viet Cong stashed corpses of their fighters in the tunnels to foil the American penchant for body counts. They hid dead GIs down there, too. Babies were born in the tunnels. In the dim light of small foot or hand generators, combat doctors operated bare-handed, using household drills for brain surgery, wood saws for amputations, sterilizing instruments in pressure cookers. Anesthetics were uncommon, Mangold reports. Honey was the main antiseptic; as it dries it becomes acidic and kills bacteria.

Such were the underground metropolises of the Viet Cong. No wonder that once the guerrillas had executed a raid and retreated in the earth, the odds shifted dramatically against anyone who followed them. The hunters became the hunted.

''The levels of the tunnels were twisted, snakelike, making the line of fire impossibly short,'' Mangold reports. ''Entrances were camouflaged and invisible. Explosives often just bounced off the clay walls. Gas was cleverly contained in sealed-off tunnel segments. The tunnels were infested with booby traps. If you somehow survived them, who was waiting for you in the dark?

Charlie with an AK-47.''

To penetrate such fortresses on the rare occasions when they would discover them, the Americans needed a special kind of soldier. At first, attack dogs had been sent down the holes. The dogs knew nothing about booby traps, and as a result of the inevitable carnage, their handlers flatly refused to sacrifice any more animals. The canine fiasco led in 1966 to the abrupt creation of an ad hoc human unit.

''The Tunnel Rats were combat engineers,'' Mangold says. ''They had to be small and thin, volunteers, and highly skilled at hand-to-hand combat. The job was to kill, capture or entomb Viet Cong with explosives. The favored weapon was a small-caliber revolver. The Americans were forbidden ever to fire off more than three shots in a row. Fire six and the enemy would know you were out of ammunition.

''There never were more than 100 Tunnel Rats, and most were killed in the tunnels. We spent three years scouring the U.S. for them and could find only 12. I suspect there`s another 10 left. The attrition rate was appalling.

''These were strange guys to begin with. They`re still tortured by the memories of what they went through. When they came marching home, America, wracked by postwar trauma and recriminations, was not interested in their story. So they never told anybody. They remain lonely, isolated, very heroic men. But they`re the heroes America never knew it had.''

Lean and as ascetic as the VC they hunted, the Tunnel Rats eschewed anything that would deaden their senses, even cologne or chewing gum. The knife or bayonet, weapons as old as war itself, determined whether they lived or died. Booby traps had to be felt for in pitch darkness. Long dormant instincts were rehoned. Fingertips and ears became what walking sticks are to the blind.

''Massive fear--that was the key,'' recalls Jack Flowers recently in a telephone interview. A onetime war resister who became a highly decorated Army officer, Flowers in 1969 served as ''Rat Six,'' commander of the crack Tunnel Rat unit of the 1st Infantry Division. He went down 97 holes after Viet Cong, each time in terror.

''You had to control and direct the fear. You made each movement with infinite care. Your senses never were more acute. In the tunnels, your adrenalin was pumping like a river. I swear I could hear my heart beating.

''We`d enter the tunnel one at a time, separated by several feet, so a grenade wouldn`t get us all. You`d feel your way along for booby traps. It got so you could sense them. The same for VC. You could smell another human being in the tunnel. You knew he was waiting for you in the dark. Many times, I tried to talk VC into surrendering. They never would.''

The Tunnel Rats never knew what they`d find.

''The VC would take a snake--we used to call them `one-step` or `two-step` snakes. They were bamboo vipers and once bitten, you could only take one or two more steps before you died. Charlie would tie the viper in a piece of bamboo with a piece of string. As the Tunnel Rat went through, he`d knock it, and the snake would come out and bite him in the neck or face. You learned to check the ceilings with your flashlight.

''The VC also would set out boxes of scorpions with a trip wire that would open the box. One of the men got stung. He came out screaming and never went back in another tunnel. We also met hornets, centipedes, great moving masses of black spiders, bats. We met rats that carried bubonic plague.''

In the heat and stinking filth, fighting claustrophobia with every breath, the Americans had to squeeze their way along, often for hundreds of yards.

''In a three-level tunnel, hidden trap doors led from one level to the next,'' Flowers says. ''First you had to find the trap door. Then squeezing down through it was scary. But going up through a trap door was the toughest thing a man could do. You had no idea what was up there above you.''

A favorite VC trick was to slit a GI`s throat, or garrote him, as he came up through a connecting trap door. Or else the guerrillas might spear the GI through the throat, impaling him in the small opening. His buddies couldn`t get him down and sometimes became hysterical. As they tried to crawl out of the tunnels, more VC would be waiting.

Once, from an opened trap door, a grenade suddenly dropped in Flowers`

lap. Like a flash, he wheeled, scrambled, and crawled far enough away to survive the blast. For years afterward, that grenade, twisting and falling in slow motion, would pervade his dreams.

Flowers declines to estimate how many enemies he killed. His last mission occurred at a freshly dug bunker complex near the Saigon River. The Americans discovered seven holes.

''My men went down six of them. They all were cold--no VC. Everybody had done a turn but me. The last hole had to be hot. Looking down the 10-foot shaft, we could make out the tunnel entrance. We knew the Cong were in there. There was no way I could ask anybody else to go down that hole.''

Flowers was due to leave Vietnam soon. He really didn`t have to explore the tunnel. But he insisted. As his men lowered him down the shaft on a sling seat, he remembers, he saw tears in their eyes. His elbows and boots rubbed against the sides of the shaft, dislodging dirt.

He pictured a VC waiting below with his AK-47 set to automatic. He could blast 20 rounds through Flowers in 4 seconds. Flowers knew he had only one chance.

''I had to shoot first. And I had to hit him in the head. All our training boiled down to this: Shoot at close range, shoot in the face.''

When he was about three feet from the bottom, Flowers` men stopped lowering him. He swung sideways, his left arm over his chest, to make himself smaller. He hunched his right shoulder to protect his temple. Then he gave a curt nod. His men dropped him.

Gun blazing, he hit the ground. The first shot drilled through the VC`s forehead. The second smashed through his cheek. The third his throat. The fourth, fifth, and sixth, his body. Flowers kept pulling the trigger, clicking, clicking, the empty chambers of his revolver.

When the smoke cleared, his shots were neatly grouped in the wall. There was no VC. Just in Flowers` mind. By firing his six shots, he had broken the Tunnel Rat code. He had broken something else as well.

''I was finished,'' he says. Quickly relieved of command and sent home, it took him years to heal. He wrote a book as therapy but didn`t try to get it published. Painfully, he completed college, married, divorced, remarried, fathered two daughters and made and lost a lot of money as a stockbroker in Philadelphia.

Now, Mangold and Penycate having found him 16 years later, Flowers suddenly finds himself a commercially authentic hero. He has sold his story to MGM. He hopes to contribute to the film. But his life again is a shambles, he says. He is going through another divorce, has quit his job and is pinning his hopes on Hollywood.

''I`m glad our story is finally being told,'' he says. ''Why did we do it? I wasn`t a tough guy. Nobody who knows me would ever suspect I could do what the Tunnel Rats did. I`d never want a son of mine to have to do it.

''But I think that if called upon, men will rise to any occasion. There is something deep inside us all, something we can use if we really have to.'' That something is primordial and very frightening, he knows.

''We should thank God,'' he says, ''that we`re not generally challenged enough in life to have to show that side of ourselves.''